m.g. points out (thanks, m.g.!) that in “Corruption, Culture, and Markets,” lipset & lenz worked up a “familism index.” unfortunately, they don’t seem to have published it anywhere — at least not that m.g. or i can find. they do describe it in the above mentioned chapter, though, along with a terrific summary of familism and its related … problems. here is a longish quote from them [pgs. 119-120 – links and emphases added by me]:

“Amoral Familism

“The second major cultural framework, one derived from Plato via Banfield, assumes that corruption is in large part an expression of particularism — the felt obligation to help, to give resources to persons to whom one has a personal obligation, to the family above all but also to friends and membership groups. Nepotism is its most visible expression. Loyalty is a particularistic obligation that was very strong in precapitalist, feudal societies. As Weber implied, loyalty and the market are antithetical. The opposite of particularism is universalism, the commitment to treat others according to a similar standard. Market norms express universalism; hence, pure capitalism exhibits and is sustained by such values.

“Plato contended two and a half millennia ago that family ties, especially those between parents and children, are the chief forces underlying institutionalized social classes and ascription. He argued that to create an egalitarian society, a communist one, such ties — the family itself — would have to be eliminated. Children would have to be reared from birth in public institutions, not knowing their parents. Plato, of course, could not have believed that a society without parental ties was viable, but his discussion points up the social power he attached to the family.

“In trying to understand capitalism’s initial rise in Protestant cultures, Weber noted that the pre-industrial norms in Catholic societies were communitarian, requiring above all that the society, the family, and the dominant strata help the less fortunate. He believed that these vales worked against the emergence of a rationally driven market economy. Conversely, a stress on individualism, concern for self, is more conducive to capital accumulation. Calvinism and Protestant sectarianism fostered such behavior. Sectarians believe that God helps those who help themselves. Weber pointed out that ‘the great achievement of … the ethical and ascetic sects of Protestantism was to shatter the fetters of the sib [the extended family].’ As Lawrence Harrison notes, ‘There is evidence that the extended family is an effective institution for survival but an obstacle to development.’ Solidarity with the extended family and hostility to the outsider who is not a member of family, the village, or perhaps the tribe can produce a self-interested culture.

“Edward Banfield, studying southern Italy, carried the analysis further with the concept of ‘amoral familism’: a culture that is deficient in communitarian values but fosters familial ties. He writes: ‘In a society of amoral familists, no one will further the interest of the group or community except as it is to his private advantage to do so.’ There is little loyalty to the larger community or acceptance of behavioral norms that require support of others. Hence, familism is amoral, gives rise to corruption, and fosters deviance from norms of universalism and merit. Anything goes that advance the interests of one’s self and family.The Mafia is an extreme example of amoral familism. Banfield, in effect, argues that corruption in southern Italy and comparable traditional societies is an expression of forces similar to those that sustain the Mafia.

“The World Values Survey 1990, together with aggregate statistics from the World Bank, provide data that we employ to create a scale of familism. The first item in the scale deals with unqualified respect for parents, measured by the percentage of people who agreed that regardless of the qualities and faults of one’s parents, a person must always love and respect them. The second item is the percentage of people who think that divorce is unjustifiable. The third, from the World Bank, is the mean number of children per woman.

“Those nations that score high on this scale tend to be among the more corrupt. Known for their strong familial ties, most Asian nations rank among the more corrupt. On the other hand, Scandinavians are by far the lowest on the familism scale — as noted, these countries are considered the least corrupt. Regression analysis affirms the association. The familism scale and CPI relate strongly. The relationship remains significant when controlling for per capita income. A model that includes the familism scale, the achievement scale, and purchasing power parity explains a great deal of the variation in the CPI.”
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i don’t think that what we’re witnessing here — the differences between particularistic and universalistic societies — is a cultural phenomenon. i’m sure that cultural practices reinforce the behaviors that you find in these two types of societies, but what i think we’re looking at are innate behavioral tendencies that differ between these different population types due, in part, to their mating patterns histories. it’s partly mating patterns (inbreeding or outbreeding) and partly selection for which of these sets of behavioral traits worked in the various populations’ evolutionary histories (the two things are connected, i think).

familism, then, i think — although interesting in and of itself — is a symptom of a set of underlying innate behavioral traits, namely those connected to familial altruism. the more “genes for familial altruism” (whatever they might be) your population possesses, the less universalistic, etc., etc., it is going to be — and vice versa. familism reflects another aspect of human biodiversity, and is not just an example human cultural diversity.

(sorry if i sound like a broken record, but there’ve been some new folks stopping by here lately — hi, new folks! — and i thought they might appreciate a crash course on The Theory.)
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so, lipset & lenz hinted around at a familism index that they had devised, but not published anywhere(?), so i thought i’d try to reconstruct it as best as i could. the first element in their index is “unqualified respect for parents, measured by the percentage of people who agreed [on the world values survey] that regardless of the qualities and faults of one’s parents, a person must always love and respect them”. lipset & lenz looked at the world values survey for 1990 — i looked at a more recent wave: 1999-2002. the question is:

With which of these two statements do you tend to agree?:
A. Regardless of what the qualities and faults of one’s parents are, one must always love and respect them.
B. One does not have the duty to respect and love parents who have not earned it by their behaviour and attitudes.

i took the “A. Always” responses and plotted them against the 2011 Corruption Perceptions Index results — and got a correlation of -0.72 (so the more you feel you should always love/respect your parents no matter how horrible they are, the more corrupt you’re likely to be – click on chart for LARGER view):

here’s the data table for the above chart sorted by the “Always” responses (highest to lowest). i’ve got the fbd marriage groups (the arabs & co.) in red, and the european groups that i think have been outbreeding for the longest (netherlands, germany, great britain, belgium and france — there might be a few more that need to be included — like the swedes?) in blue (click on table for LARGER view):

note that the italians exhibit much more familism (79.40%) on this scale than the population of great britain (65.10%) and are also more corrupt (3.9 on the cpi versus 7.8 for the british). this appears to support what i found in my familism in the u.s. of a. post the other day — that italian-americans are more familistic than anglo-americans. (see this post for some recent history on inbreeding in italy.)

similarly, the irish (in ireland) respect their parents no matter what more than the british (71.90% vs. 65.10%), but they’re not at all as corrupt as the italians (7.5 on the cpi). and the roman catholic irish in the u.s. are more familistic than anglo-americans. (see this post for a brief history of inbreeding/mating patterns in ireland.)

and mexicans! 90.20% said they’d respect their parents no matter what. 3.0 on the cpi. and very familistic in the u.s. (see this post for a little info on the history of inbreeding/mating patterns in part of mexico.)

these, i think, are innate, not just learned, feelings (reinforced by cultural practices, i’m sure), and they’re not going to change anytime soon as shown by the fact that italian- and irish-americans are still very familistic despite living amongst the anglo-americans for several generations now.

If you reverse your phrasing your conclusion becomes more credible. Saying that inbreeding results in the evolution of familism makes sense, but if that were the case then there would be more variation in familism, instead of the pretty similar forms found world-wide. Each region would have evolved its own form of nepotism. It is hard to believe that every region evolved the same sort of familism in the last thousand years ago.

However the reality is that inbreeding is the traditional mating pattern. Total outbreeding is the novel form. It seems to have only occurred in one place on a major scale, in Europe. So rather than talking about inbreeding and how that causes humans to evolve, the opposite works better.

In addition to evolution there is another biological approach: the breakdown of kin recognition. Imagine a scenario where you have two villages that are inbred. Then you force them all to mate with people in the other village for two generations. Now the F2 generation is going to be composed of people where they might look very different from their siblings. The kin recognition mechanism is off.

Additionally genes might be able to detect how inbred the person bearing them is. Let’s say that there is an allele A. An inbred person will probably have AA or aa. An outbred will probably have Aa. An inbred person probably has both parents in the same tribe and it would make sense for him to be nepotistic towards his relatives, because they will be towards him. Now consider the outbred person, the Aa. He might be the result of a diplomatic marriage between two tribes, or rape. Whatever tribe he lives with he will still be somewhat of an outsider. It doesn’t make as much sense for him to be nepotistic towards his tribe, because they aren’t going to do the same for him. Instead it makes sense for him to hedge his bets, to seek acceptance within both tribes, and to focus his resources on himself.

Nice summary post. Shouldn’t it be possible to test whether relatedness alone produces these particularistic behaviors as opposed to your hypothesis (I think) which argues that many generations of relatedness is required? If the first is true, then taking an individual out of his extended family network and placing him or her in a new social environment not characterized by such networks should be enough to instill more universalistic norms.

For instance, Chinese women who marry American men and move to the United States? What about their offspring?

I’m thinking that a society which has been largely composed of extended families living in close proximity for many generations is what produces a culture of nepotism, corruption, etc.., but that once you remove an individual from both the extended family network and the culture most of these behavioral tendencies would disappear.

For instance, Sicilian Americans who have moved away from their ethnic enclaves and married outside their ethnicity?

lukelea, I was raised in the US, in a nuclear family. My family moved around constantly. My ancestors are from all over Europe, and they have been moving away from their families for generations. So I should be 100% nuclear family right? Well except that when I read The Explanation of Ideology I recognized myself completely in the chapter on authoritarian families, the sense of lineage, time, land, etc…. Well not in terms of ideology, social democracy and christian democracy do not appeal to me. My ideology is actually that we should go back to the stem family model. I came up with my own version of the stem family (though each family would have two heirs, by inheritance through both lines) even before I had heard of HBD blogs. I just looked at my ancestry and compared it to Todd’s map of Europe. 84% of my ancestry comes from the authoritarian/stem family regions of Europe. Not just one of those regions, but several of them. I yearn to live in such a society and I’ve created a very strong ideology around it. So at least in my case my love of the stem family is genetic. I created the concept like a bee creates a hive. Perhaps in those regions there is only a slight genetic trend in that direction, and maybe I have hybrid vigor in terms of my propensity for the stem family.

@adrian – “Are there any statistics that measure the degree of inbreeding/outbreeding in a population?”

no. no good ones (yet — it’s coming, though, with more and more genetic analyses of populations!).

what there is is a lot of partial/suggestive/helpful but incomplete evidence:

1) there’s the consang.net data (and other similar data floating around out there that, for whatever reasons, aren’t a part of the consang.net compilation). the consang.net data tells us the cousin marriage rates for a number of populations; but, imho, it’s incomplete because there’s no time depth to it. and, also, not every society around the world has been included (but that’s not the fault of the awesome folks who have compiled this data set!).

3) there’s a lot — a LOT — of historic/anthropological information out there on mating patterns around the world. it’s just that it’s all over the place and not consistent — and, of course, doesn’t tell us as precisely as good genetic data would do how inbred or outbred populations are. it’s useful info, i think (thus my attempts to compile some of it — see “mating patters” series below ↓ in left-hand column — that’s just the tip of the iceberg though), but good genetic data would, of course, be better. much, much better.

@t – “Each region would have evolved its own form of nepotism. It is hard to believe that every region evolved the same sort of familism in the last thousand years ago.”

@ihtg – “Isn’t this in fact the reality?”

what ihtg said (or suggested).

the longer version is: try to think of it as more than just familism/nepotism — keep in mind all the sorts of “innate social aptitudes of man” (see also here) that might be connected to inclusive fitness, which (i think) include, but are not (i think) limited to, the following:

so you don’t need to see particular forms of — specifically — nepotism evolving in different regions to conclude that what we’re seeing here is the evolution of different behavioral traits. what you will more likely see are different packages of “innate social behaviors” given the different types and degrees of inbreeding or outbreeding.

thus (i think) you get things in the arab/muslim world like honor killings that you don’t see too much of elsewhere. i’ve theorized that honor killings are an extreme version of inclusive fitness (inclusive inclusive fitness) that is somehow connected to the extreme form of inbreeding that the arabs have been practicing for 2000+ years. (i could, of course, be wrong. (^_^) ) and, at the other end of the spectrum, you get the whole package of universalistic traits in outbred nw europeans: reciprocally altruistic to non-relatives, universalitic, non-familistic, low corruption, low nepotism, high civicness, individualistic, liberally democratic — and no honor killings.

@t – “Each region would have evolved its own form of nepotism. It is hard to believe that every region evolved the same sort of familism in the last thousand years ago.”

remember, too, that there are not only different forms of “innate social behaviors” to think about, but different degrees of them, i.e. more inbred populations ought to be more corrupt, etc., etc.

i’ve added a chart to the post above to indicate this. according to my theory, populations that have a longer history of inbreeding ought to be more corrupt, right? so, i pulled out a handful of “mating pattern regions” from the corruptions perception index to see what the average corruption rate is for each of the regions. the handful of regions are (see “mating patterns” series below ↓ in left-hand column for more details on each of the groups — these are broad patterns, of course):

– nw europeans (france, belgium, great britain, germany, luxembourg, the netherlands): longest history of the greatest outbreeding (i think).– western slavs (poland, slovakia, czech republic): shorter history of outbreeding than western europe due to the relatively late arrival of both christianity and the manor system, but roman catholic so strong-ish pressures to outbreed from the church;– eastern slavs (russia, ukraine, belarus): shorter history of outbreeding than western europe due to the relatively late arrival of both christianity and the manor system, and eastern orthodox so not the strongest of pressures to outbreed from that church — generally pretty close endogamy;– the balkans (albania, bosnia & herzegovina, bulgaria, greece, romania, macedonia, croatia, turkey): variable, but much shorter history of outbreeding than western europe due to the complete lack of the manor system and the low enforcement against close cousin marriages by the eastern church. also, islam in some of the populations (which encourages close marriages.) likely a long history of close endogamy;– arab/muslim world (pakistan, iran, egypt, algeria, morocco, saudi arabia, jordan): very close inbreeding (fbd marriage) for a very long time, 2000+ years in places like saudi arabia.

according to The Theory, then, the populations with the most/longest history of inbreeding ought to be the most corrupt, and the populations with the most/longest history of outbreeding ought to be the least corrupt. it should go like this (most to least corrupt):

close! (^_^) dunno why the eastern slavs are more corrupt than the arab/muslim world. (eastern europe also vies for last place with the arab world when it comes to civicness.) either i’m completely wrong (don’t think so since the rest of the pattern is right), or i’ve missed something, and/or other factors are at play here, too. i can accept that. (~_^)

@t – “If you reverse your phrasing your conclusion becomes more credible…. However the reality is that inbreeding is the traditional mating pattern. Total outbreeding is the novel form. It seems to have only occurred in one place on a major scale, in Europe. So rather than talking about inbreeding and how that causes humans to evolve, the opposite works better.”

that is a very good point.

i think that i talk about the curiousness of inbreeding so much since, coming from a western perspective, we (some of us, anyway (~_^) ) are so outbred and that seems/feels like “normal” to us — when, of course, like you say, it’s actually odd. but for most westerners, it isn’t odd — and in my experience most westerners that i mention this to are quite surprised when they learn how much cousin marriage/endogamy goes on even today in large parts of the world. most people everywhere just assume that other people are like them.

but you’re right — nw europeans are the exception. also, i think the bushmen might be quite outbred. i thought that the eskimos were as well, but i’ve learned lately that that is not the case (stay tuned…). (^_^)

@t – “In addition to evolution there is another biological approach: the breakdown of kin recognition.”

yes, that is a possibility, too, and has been brought up here in the comments by a few commenters (most often by greying wanderer, i think).

i would bet that kin recognition does, indeed, play a role here, and that people ought to be able to detect that they share more genes with their relatives when they are inbred than outbred individuals do. genetic similarity theory seems to be a real thing — i buy it, anyway. so, yes, i do think that kin recognition is in play here as well.

however, given that sh*t evolution happens, i can’t see why it wouldn’t happen in the case of behavioral traits related to sociality (which is what we’re talking about here). inbreeding alone will not alter the type or number of genes (alleles) in a population, but there are indications that it can accelerate the selection for “genes for altruism” (see here and here). that’s why i think (i guess i assume) we must be talking about different genes/different frequencies of genes for social behaviors in these different populations.

@t – “Additionally genes might be able to detect how inbred the person bearing them is.”

hamilton suggested that, perhaps, the more outbred members of a family would be more altruistic to the more inbred members of their family since the more inbred members ought to (on average) possess more of whatever genes for altruism we’re talking about. (^_^)

(if so, could that mean that more outbred populations might be, on average, more altruistic to more inbred populations? in a kind of a recognition error sort-of way?)

@luke – “Shouldn’t it be possible to test whether relatedness alone produces these particularistic behaviors as opposed to your hypothesis (I think) which argues that many generations of relatedness is required? If the first is true, then taking an individual out of his extended family network and placing him or her in a new social environment not characterized by such networks should be enough to instill more universalistic norms.”

yes! we need adopted identical twin studies in which pairs of southern italians/albanians/arabs/chinese kids are separated from birth and one raised in an inbred/clannish population and the other raised by wasps! (~_^)

seriously — yes, presumably that could be done, but we’d never get the grant funding for it, i think. (^_^)

@luke – “For instance, Chinese women who marry American men and move to the United States? What about their offspring? … For instance, Sicilian Americans who have moved away from their ethnic enclaves and married outside their ethnicity?”

yeah, those sorts of groups would be good to look at — if it were possible.

we do have some circumstantial evidence, though. what i posted in familism in the u.s. of a., for instance. both italian-americans and roman catholic irish-americans are more familistic than anglo-americans — and the majority of both of those groups has been here for quite a long time now, right? since the late-1800s, early 1990s, no? are they still living in italian- and irish-american enclaves? well, kinda-sorta if you think of jersey shore or boston, but plenty live in the ‘burbs now, too. how long should this assimilation process take?

nope. i’m not buying it. there’s something genetic here at work, me thinks. personality traits. behavioral traits. which are not 100% determined by genes as we know, so taking these people out of their clannish societies probably does alter their behavior — to some degree. but i just don’t think you’re going to get them to behave towards others the way that wasps do — not just by relocating them — or even adopting them all out to wasp parents.

@luke – “For instance, Chinese women who marry American men and move to the United States? What about their offspring?”

would depend (i think) on which american men the chinese women marry. anglo-americans? italian-americans? albanian-americans?

this is the same sort of issue brought up about what about all the european genes in mexico? shouldn’t the mexicans now be quite european in behavior when it comes to these “innate social aptitudes” since most of them are mestizos? well, which european population did they acquire new genes from? spain!

African Americans are highly out-bred for historical reasons. How do they fit in to this analysis? My guess is that other factors overwhelm the signal you are looking for.

Anecdotally, my best friend, Richard Baralli, is Sicilian and married to a local Jewish girl here in Chattanooga. They are completely integrated into the upper-middle class Anglo society in which they live even though their ethnic identity has not been erased (though for Richard it is more in the nature of a memory; his wife still goes to Temple). Their children don’t even know what the word Ashkenazi means. They have married out and live in other parts of the country. The only continuity is that they all vote Democratic in contradistinction to the majority of their neighbors though in complete accord with all their friends. I’m the only true independent among them, I think, though even I have never voted Republican. (This time I’m not voting.)

@T – very interesting comment. Do you know of other examples?

Lastly, as anyone who is familiar with my utopian thinking knows, I would favor a return to more inbred communities in the future, not at the family or village level but at the town or county. A certain amount of ingroup-outgroup identifying would make for a stronger sense of local community, which I find appealing. Maybe that’s a gene in me? The future of evolution under this scenario would be at the town level and would involve inter-community economic competition for outside capital investment in local industries, to which they would have exclusive access (territorial unions) The least successful communities would probably experience out-migration to the nearest big city, which would serve as a kind of population sink. (Lots of decadence and drugs!) Unsucessful communities might also be replenished by new immigrants escaping the city. This is just a fantasy of mine, a forty year old fantasy if you can believe it.

@luke – “African Americans are highly out-bred for historical reasons. How do they fit in to this analysis?”

are you thinking of african americans and corruption? (or violence?)

the thing with african americans is that, yes, they are outbred for historical reasons (slavery being the big one — different west african populations being mixed up plus some admixture with whites/native americans), but remember that african american slaves came from societies that (prolly) had a loooong histories of inbreeding.

AND remember that it’s not just the inbreeding or outbreeding that matters — it’s inbreeding/outbreeding PLUS selection (the inbreeding just amplifies the selection for “genes for altruism” if the necessary selection pressures are there).

so, yes, african americans have been outbreeding for many generations now (8-10? 12?), but what selection pressures have they been subjected to that would get rid of whatever “genes for altruism” their ancestors had acquired back in african societies? during slavery? would those conditions select for individuals that were very altruistic towards unrelated individuals? i dunno. how about post-slavery? life in the ghetto? i really dunno ’cause i haven’t thought about it (yet!) … but those are the kinda questions we’d have to ask. (^_^)

but what i think we’re looking at are innate behavioral tendencies that differ between these different population types due, in part, to their mating patterns histories.

Yes. The few times I’ve written about corruption, this is the point I try to drive home. When you sit and think that nearly 100% of the pundits and academics who study the subject these days treat it as if it were something that could be changed by just popping in new set of laws, it’s mind-bending. And yes, I know about exceptions like Singapore, which are all the more interesting cause they’re so rare.

here’s the data table for the above chart sorted by the “Always” responses (highest to lowest)

I’m so glad you took the time to put this together. Looking at the table, the bottom end is striking: Look how what they used to call ‘the Teutonics’ bunch up there! The ten lowest countries are all in that group. Outlier ‘Teutonics’ = U.S., Canada. (the U.S. might not even be 50% ‘Teutonic’ at this point though)

And when you look at the relation between columns 2 and 3, some surprises. You’d expect low numbers in column 2 with high numbers in column 3 (and the reverse). But lots of Eastern European countries seem both low parental-attachment and high corruption. (Belarus, Croatia, Czech Rep, Slovakia)…a holdover from Communism? Also, at the top of column two, look who sticks out like a sore thumb as far as corruption goes….Singapore. They really are an odd duck.

I also find Greece strangely placed. I’d have pegged their parental attachment much higher. But they’re at the Great Britain level. (but with very high corruption levels) Do they have something in common with Croatia, Czech Rep, and Slovakia, who all have similar parental-attachment / corruption numbers as them?

So much food for thought here! If Lipsett and Lenz aren’t careful, people are going to start referring to ‘HBD Chick’s familism scale’….FYI Lipsett and Lenz in case you’re reading…

@m.g. – “And yes, I know about exceptions like Singapore, which are all the more interesting cause they’re so rare.”

yes. we need to learn more about singapore. how do/did they do it? i’m pretty sure the high chinese iq helped. and the fact that the chinese (and others) there were sort of a self-sorted bunch — i.e. people who had left china for a better life.

@m.g. – “Look how what they used to call ‘the Teutonics’ bunch up there! The ten lowest countries are all in that group.”

yeah, even i’m prepared to admit that there’s more to corruption, nepotism, etc., etc., than just the mating patterns. it also seems to help to just be germanic. (~_^)

the eastern europeans really are a mystery to me. according to The Theory, the arabs/muslims should be the most corrupt/least civic, and while their scores on both of those are very low, the eastern europeans often beat them to the bottom. a holdover from communism? maybe. but then i wind up asking, why (totalitarian) communism in that part of the world at all…?